The Trumpology series of columns are also published on Capitol Hill Blue where I am a columnist, and are informed by my 40 years of experience as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. I worked in Michigan as Mason Mental Health Center director and Middleboro, Massachusetts in private practice. Opinions on Trump come from my understanding of psychiatric diagnosis, psychology, and psychopathology. I consider Trump to be a sadistic impulsive malignant narcissist.

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April 20, 2018

Politico puts it well:The memos, obtained by POLITICO, appeared to be an instant political Rorschach test, with Trump allies declaring that the memos absolved the president of any whiff of improper conduct and Democrats suggesting they revealed the president's contempt for institutions of justice.

By the top of the second page of the first memo former FBI director James B. Comey wrote to memorialize his conversations with President Trump, prostitutes are mentioned. Sex workers are a running theme in the seven memos released on Thursday evening, a function of their prominent role in the dossier of unproven allegations involving the president’s 2016 campaign and the president’s apparent insistence on raising the subject on most of the occasions in which he and Comey spoke.

One particular discussion of the subject, though, is important for nontitillating reasons.

In a memo dated Feb. 8, 2017, written after an informal Oval Office meeting between Trump and himself, Comey writes:

“The President said ‘the hookers thing’ is nonsense but that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin had told him ‘we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.’ He did not say when Putin had told him this and I don’t recall [REDACTED].”

As is often the case with redactions, the missing section in this quote raises a lot of possibilities. But the point on which we should focus is the point onto which Comey also latched: When, exactly, did Trump and Putin have this conversation about sex workers?

This is important, because Trump’s admitted communications with Putin were limited. While Trump at one point claimed to have had a number of interactions with the Russian president, when it became apparent during the campaign that clear links to Putin might cast doubt on his loyalties, Trump quickly — and believably — backed away from any claimed relationship. If Trump and Putin had held more conversations than are known, it adds significant credibility to the idea that the Russian government and the Trump campaign might have had high-level, coordinated contacts.

↓↓↓↓↓↓During the event, Trump’s longtime aide Keith Schiller testified last November, an unidentified Russian offered to send five prostitutes to Trump’s room at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton — where the allegations outlined in the dossier of reports compiled by British intelligence officer Christopher Steele purportedly occurred. (In the Comey memos, the former FBI director writes that Trump twice denied having stayed the night in Moscow, which Schiller’s testimony undercuts.)

↔↔↔↔↔↔My morning post↔↔↔↔↔Rachel Maddow's show was more extraordinary than some of her other extraordinary shows which broke news as it was breaking. In fact, watching Chris Hayes in the hour before hers I saw him break the news that the AP had just released the Comey memos. (If you don't know what they are you haven't been paying attention for the last year.) She had Comey in her studio waiting for his much anticipated interview.Then Rachel, her staff, and Comey had only 25 minutes to review the memos. As the show progressed most of her questions had to do with what she just learned from the memos. She even was reading them during the commercial breaks.Here are the actual memos.You will no doubt learn more about the memos today. Below, excerpted from The New York Times, are the six major takeaways from the memos. As usual, Trump's woman problem emerges and will be one of the primary focuses of the media attention because a previously unknown phone conversation Trump said he had with Putin, one which would have been his first, included Putin saying Russia had the most beautiful hookers in the world. Comey doesn't think this conversation happened. Instead he thinks Trump made up the story after seeing a video of Putin saying this on Russian TV. By the end of the day if you watch the non-Fox news you will probably have seen this clip of Putin.

Trump’s Preoccupation With the Dossier - especially the hooker story

The Dossier’s Allegations Were Corroborated

Trump’s Focus on McCabe, Then a Relative Unknown - According to the memos, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Comey during their January dinner whether Mr. McCabe “had a problem” with the president.

What Priebus Knew - At their dinner, Mr. Trump gave contradictory explanations about whether Mr. Priebus knew they were meeting.

The Flynn Investigation - In their own meeting on Feb. 8, 2017, Mr. Priebus tried to ask Mr. Comey whether the F.B.I. was wiretapping the national security adviser at the time, Michael T. Flynn.

Hunting Leakers - Mr. Comey explained how he hoped to catch one of the leakers to set an example.

This is how Trump reacted to the release of the memos. This Tweet was written at 8:37 PM, not too long after the memos were released. When he read them all himself, or had someone read them for him, possibly on Fox News, remains to be determined.

We can only speculate as to whether or not he was watching Comey on Rachel Maddow last night when Comey actually discussed the memos.

Of course Trump is downright wrong here. The memos support Comey's previous acocunts of the meetings with the president. They suggest that there may have been obstruction, and do not address the subject of collussion.

There is no evidence in the memos that Comey leaked classified information.

By the time Trump was twitterbating at 3:00 AM this morning this is how he wrapped his mind around the release of the memos:

Fox News is using the I'm rubber, you're glue defense, better suited for the court of brainwashed Trumper public opinion than a real court.

Obstruction of justice over the handling of the Clinton email investigation; lying to Congress over the conclusion of that investigation; theft of government property, in the form of his leaked memos; and abuse of power over the infamous Steele dossier. These are among the crimes that there are strong grounds to argue James Comey committed.

Worse even than that, the more that we learn – from Comey and others – about the conduct of the Obama administration and its senior officials during the late stages of the 2016 presidential election, and in the transition period before President Trump’s inauguration, the more it appears that a truly frightening usurpation of the democratic process might have been attempted.

Any fair-minded person would acknowledge that there is at least as much reason to suspect that the FBI, Department of Justice and others in the federal bureaucracy colluded with the Obama administration and Clinton campaign to influence the 2016 election as there are reasons to suspect that Donald Trump and his associates colluded with the Russians in similar vein.And then there's this:

Trump told Comey he didn't even spend a night there -- but that's not what his bodyguard testified.

What stands out in this book is Dr. Lee’s cri de coeur: “[T]he only people not allowed to speak about an issue are those who know the most about it.” I wish I believed that psychiatrists did in fact know the most about cases of dangerousness, but the totality of the empirical evidence available today refutes that. Lee claims in a crucial footnote that “dangerousness” is more about the situation, and not so much about the person. If that were so, on this view, there would be less need for a psychiatrist to have known or personally examined Donald Trump. But does anyone believe that psychiatrists know more about the presidency and the situation in the White House than other professionals?

The last chapter of the book carries the title, “He’s Got the World in His Hands and his Finger on the Trigger.” In it, two psychiatrists urge Congress to appoint a panel of experts to examine the president. Their proposed panel is to include three “non-partisan” neuropsychiatrists (not just plain-vanilla psychiatrists). Obviously, none of the contributors to this book could now claim to be “non-partisan.” More ironically, however, of the psychiatrists who opine about Trump as the “dangerous case,” none identify themselves as “neuropsychiatrists,” and none are recognized as such by our profession.

Still, there is an epilogue to this book written by the redoubtable Noam Chomsky. The two greatest threats to the planet, he tells us, are global warming and nuclear holocaust, and Trump is a menace on both counts. You do not have to be a psychiatrist to believe that.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) expressed similar faith that Trump wouldn’t sack Mueller: “I have no reason to believe that that’s going to happen” because “I have assurances that it’s not.”

Courting disaster because of what they “think” and “believe” the erratic president will do? You may think your toddler won’t wander into traffic. You may even have her assurances. But that doesn’t mean you leave her in the front yard unattended.

So how might the end game play itself out? There are at least four possible scenarios.

The first scenario is that Mueller will come up with enough evidence that Trump has committed crimes, whether obstruction of justice or conspiracy with the Russians to steal the election, and will indict the president in office. This would lead to a constitutional showdown at the Supreme Court between Mueller and Trump. While a previous Supreme Court decision, Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681 (1997) found unanimously that a president does not have immunity from a civil lawsuit, the court has not faced a decision as to whether a sitting president can be criminally indicted.

If the court took up the case, and found against Trump, Mueller’s charges against him would be in force, and Trump would face arrest and prosecution. It’s possible that the court could find that Trump can be indicted but not face trial until after he leaves office. In that case, Trump would be facing charges that could put him in prison sometime after he left office. The only way he could leave office and not face such criminal charges would be if he resigned and made a deal with the man who succeeds him for a pardon, similar to the way that Nixon resigned in 1974 and was pardoned by Gerald Ford for any and all crimes he committed against the United States while president.

The second scenario is that Mueller could issue a finding that Trump had committed crimes while in office without indicting him. In this case, Mueller’s report would be forwarded to the United States Congress and the House of Representatives would be faced with the decision whether or not to impeach him. In this scenario, much would depend on the 2018 elections. Democrats may retake the House, and many are predicting they will. In that case, a vote to impeach Trump would seem assured, although conviction in the Senate would be less than a sure thing. Trump couldtough it out and win his trial in the Senate, like Clinton did in 1998 and 1999. He would then be able to run for re-election in 2020. A win by Trump would seem to be improbable, but then, strange things have happened before.

The third scenario is that Mueller’s investigation would lead to indictments of people close to Trump, such as Michael Cohen, or even Jared Kushner and/or Donald Trump Jr. Trump could preemptively pardon these individuals (or anyone else charged, for that matter) similar to the way President George H.W. Bush pardoned is former Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, days before he was to stand trial for charges brought against him by an independent prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal. The president’s pardon power is broad. The Constitution grants to the president, in Article II, Section 2, "Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

A pardon of a man like Michael Cohen might save Trump from the possibility that Cohen would flip and testify against him rather than face trial. But an argument could be made that having been granted a pardon would relieve Cohen of his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, and he could still be compelled to testify against Trump. So Trump may not be able to pardon his way out of trouble in a showdown with Mueller after all.

The president’s pardon power is for “Offences against the United States,” which is to say in the cases of federal crimes. If charges were brought by the State of New York against Trump’s lawyer, or his son, or son-in-law, for example, Trump would not have the power to grant them pardons. The only way he could possibly save them would be to make a deal with the State of New York, which is unlikely, especially if he had already pardoned them on federal charges.

Which brings us to scenario number four. This one is based on the belief among many long-time Trump watchers that the only thing that really matters to Trump is his personal fortune. In this scenario, Trump will do anything to protect his business and his lifestyle once he leaves office. He may yet face charges that would follow him after he leaves the presidency. Federal and state charges could threaten not only to send him to prison, but lay siege to his empire.

His son and close associates may face state charges he can’t protect them from. If this were to come to pass, the only way out for Trump would be the Nixon way: make a deal to resign and be pardoned on the federal charges, and have the deal be contingent on the state charges being dropped against himself or those close to him as well. Nixon resigned from office with his fortune intact, including his homes in Key Biscayne and San Clemente. Trump may have to do the same if he wants to keep living at Trump Tower and visiting Mar-a-Lago.

STATE OF NEW YORKOFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERALApril 18, 2018Speaker Carl E. HeastieNew York State AssemblyLegislative Office Building, Room 932 Albany, NY 12248Majority Leader John J. Flanagan New York State SenateRoom 330, State Capitol Building Albany, NY 12247

Dear Governor Cuomo, Speaker Heastie, Majority Leader Flanagan, Minority Leader Stewart- Cousins, and Minority Leader Kolb:The President’s power to pardon federal crimes is sweeping and subject to limited review by the other branches of government. Our country’s founders argued this power was “benign”and would be used by presidents with “scrupulousness and caution.”i Thus far, they have generally been right. Since the Nation’s founding, presidents have used this power sparingly, largely to do justice, rather than subvert it.Yet recent reports indicate that the President may be considering issuing pardons that may impede criminal investigations. This is disturbing news, not only because it would undermine public confidence in the rule of law, but also because—due to a little-known feature of New York law that appears to be unique in its reach—a strategically-timed pardon could prevent individuals who may have violated our State’s laws from standing trial in our courts as well. My staff has researched the relevant state statute and its legislative history, and can find no evidence that the Legislature intended this result. Therefore, I write to urge you to amend a law that may prevent state prosecutors from pursuing serious violations of state criminal law after a presidential pardon.

The federalist system enshrined in the U.S. Constitution envisions two levels of government, state and federal, each with independent authority.ii Although crimes may be prosecuted at both levels, “‘States possess primary authority for defining and enforcing’ criminal laws, including those prohibiting the gravest crimes.”iii The federal government may also, of course, enact and enforce criminal laws within the scope of Congress’s enumerated powers.ivAn important constitutional limitation on criminal prosecutions is the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which states: “nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.”v This protection, rooted in the common law, reflects an important principle that a government should not be permitted multiple attempts to try an individual for the same offense. Our State’s Constitution contains a similar protection, and the Court of Appeals recently noted that “[t]he Double Jeopardy Clauses in the State and Federal Constitutions are nearly identically worded, and we have never suggested that state constitutional double jeopardy protection differs from its federal counterpart.”viUnder U.S. Supreme Court precedent, a federal prosecution poses no constitutional bar under the Double Jeopardy Clause to a subsequent state prosecution, and vice versa.vii This constitutional principle reflects the independent sovereign criminal law enforcement powers of the States and the Federal Government. “The States are separate sovereigns from the Federal Government.”viiiAlthough more than twenty states grant only the minimum double-jeopardy protection required by the Constitution, New York and several other states have added statutory protections that go beyond those requirements.ix These laws generally provide limited protections against successive prosecutions under state criminal law only where another jurisdiction (such as another State) already has prosecuted the defendant for identical criminal acts or offenses. As a longtime supporter of criminal justice reform, I am proud that New York has long been among the leaders in protecting criminal defendants from facing successive punishments for the same acts.xNevertheless, New York’s statutory protections could result in the unintended and unjust consequence of insulating someone pardoned for serious federal crimes from subsequent prosecution for state crimes—even if that person was never tried or convicted in federal court, and never served a single day in federal prison.The problem arises under Article 40 of the Criminal Procedure Law. Under that law, jeopardy attaches when a defendant pleads guilty, or, if the defendant proceeds to a jury trial, the moment the jury is sworn.xi If any of those steps occur in a federal prosecution, then a subsequent prosecution for state crimes “based upon the same act or criminal transaction” cannotproceed, unless an exception applies.xii New York’s law provides exceptions when a courtnullifies a prior criminal proceeding (such as when an appeals court vacates a conviction),xiii or even when a federal court overturns a federal conviction because the prosecution failed to establish an element of the crime that is not an element of the New York crime.xiv But there is no parallel exception for when the President effectively nullifies a federal criminal prosecution via pardon.

Thus, if a federal defendant pleads guilty to a federal crime, or if a jury is sworn in a federal criminal trial against that defendant, and then the President pardons that individual, this New York statute could be invoked to argue that a subsequent state prosecution is barred. Simply put, a defendant pardoned by the President for a serious federal crime could be freed from allaccountability under federal and state criminal law, even though the President has no authority under the U.S. Constitution to pardon state crimes.xvThe Legislature could not possibly have intended this result. The Court of Appeals hasnoted that the Legislature recognized “that the general rule barring subsequent prosecutions was too broad,” and so “added to the statute [several] exceptions in which a second prosecution is expressly permitted.”xvi And, after the First Department ruled that certain state tax charges against Leona Helmsley were barred because of a prior federal prosecution,xvii the Legislature amended the law to enable state tax fraud prosecutions notwithstanding a prior prosecution for a conspiracy to commit federal tax fraud.xviii The statute today has twelve exceptions.xixThe Legislature should take a similar route here, and do so quickly. Any amendment should be narrow and ensure only that a state prosecution is not barred by a proceeding that the President annulled by issuing a pardon. The amendment could be modeled on existing provisions that enable subsequent prosecution when a prior proceeding is nullified by court order. My team and I are confident that well-crafted legislation to close New York’s double-jeopardy loophole would not only withstand constitutional scrutiny, but would advance the cause of justice and help preserve the rule of law. I stand ready to work with you to advance such legislation.Thank you for your attention to this important matter. Sincerely,Eric T. Schneiderman Attorney GeneralRead story here

From the NY Times (email me if you can't read the entire article), The Forrest Gump PresidentByJennifer Finney Boylan

Contributing Opinion Writer, NY Times

“It’s like Forrest Gump won the presidency,” said a Republican congressman in a conversation that Erick Erickson described last week on The Resurgent. The congressman went on, adding profanities, not reproduced here: “But it’s an evil, really stupid Forrest Gump. He can’t help himself. He’s just an idiot who thinks he’s winning when people are bitching about him.”

This comes from a congressman who, Mr. Erickson said, regularly appears on Fox News to defend President Trump. The same congressman used a barnyard epithet to describe how the president treated his fellow Republicans, and concluded, “if we’re going to lose, we may as well impeach the —” well, as we used to say during Watergate, expletive deleted.

They make a wild duet, Gump and Trump, like the set of identical cousins on the old “Patty Duke Show”: “One pair of matching bookends, different as night and day.” But one important difference between the fictional Forrest Gump as played by Tom Hanks in the 1994 film and the president of the United States, as played by Donald Trump in 2018, is that Gump is a fundamentally modest man, painfully aware of his own limitations. “I am not a smart man,” he says. “But I know what love is.”

Mr. Trump says, in contrast, “I’m like, smart.” Does he know what love is? “You know, I don’t want to sound too much like a chauvinist, but when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I’ll go through the roof, O.K.?” he said in the same year “Forrest Gump” was released. So there’s that.

This is not just about pardons. It is particularly important if Trump appoints someone new to head the NY lower Manhattan Federal Attorney position which he can do in about 10 days. The present acting attorney, who Trump appointed, recused himself. If a new person stops the current investigation into the Michael Cohen matters it would be up to New York State to investigate and prosecute.

Excerpt:

Here it is striking to compare Captain Shults’ plight with that of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in his legendary “miracle on the Hudson” landing. Sullenberger lost both engines to a bird strike, but his airplane, the Airbus A320, had “fly-by-wire” controls that gave him an automatic safety margin by restricting the control movements to a computer-dictated “envelope.” In contrast, the flight controls of the Southwest 737, although monitored through computers, remain as they were in the analog age, with the pilot controlling directly through a “yoke.”

And this is where Captain Shults’ background came into play. She was an ex-Navy pilot and one of the first women to fly the “Top Gun” F-18 Hornet, eventually becoming an instructor. Landing supersonic jets on the decks of aircraft carriers is one of the most demanding skills in military aviation. Now, flying on the one engine called for her to use all of her “seat of the pants” instincts to nurse the jet to the runway.

“Landing supersonic jets on the decks of aircraft carriers is one of the most demanding skills in military aviation. Now, flying on the one engine called for her to use all of her ‘seat of the pants’ instincts to nurse the jet to the runway.”

Normally a 737 on final approach would deploy its wing flaps to their full extent, to reduce landing speed to around 140 mph. But Captain Shults’ skills and experience forewarned her that an airplane flying that slowly with its flaps fully extended and with asymmetrical power could become fatally unstable in the final stage of the landing, so she used a minimal flap setting to maintain a higher speed and stability—taking the risk that the landing gear and particularly the tires could survive a higher speed impact.

As the jet came into land the controllers in the Philadelphia tower, looking at it through binoculars, could see that there was an open gash in the side of the cabin. At the same time it was reported that a large piece of the left engine’s cowling had fallen to the ground 60 miles northwest of the airport.

Captain Shults faced another problem with the speed of the landing: she could not deploy the airplane’s engine thrust reversers to help brake the speed after touchdown because of the damage to her left engine. However the touchdown was perfect and, once slowed, the jet came to rest on a taxiway where a fire crew sprayed the damaged engine with foam and put out a small fire from leaking fuel.

The warning of an engine fire had been a false one, probably caused by damage to the alarm system’s wiring.

According to reports Shults was raised on a New Mexico ranch near Holloman Air Force base. “Some people grow up around aviation. I grew up under it” she told Linda Maloney, the author of the book Military Fly Moms by Linda Maloney.

When she announced in her senior year at high school that she wanted to be a pilot a retired colonel told her “there are no professional women pilots.” That was, apparently, a problem for her when she applied to train to be a pilot in the Air Force. They rejected her, but the Navy gave her the break—and, obviously, it was a very smart move, particularly for everyone aboard Flight 1380.

Colbert described Cohen as a “New York attorney and sad neck with hair.”

“Jon Stewart, after the show, I’m gonna come over and we’re just going to spoon, just spoon,” Colbert said. “This is crazy.”

April 16, 2018 The Mostly Comey and Cohen EditionTidbit:When it comes to watching people go after the president, it seems the American public is much more interested in what an adult-film star has to say than a former FBI director. James Comey’s interview on ABC’s 20/20 Sunday night attracted 9.8 million viewers. While that represented a respectable number, it was less than half the 22 million who tuned in last month to watch Stormy Daniels dish the dirt on her alleged affair with President Donald Trump. (Newsweek via RawStory)

This cartoon was just shown on Velshi and Ruhl on MSNBC, click image to enlarge

EXCERPT: What the FBI would discover in October 2016 was that it had inadvertently located a cache of Clinton emails on her aide Huma Abedin’s computer during the unrelated investigation of Abedin’s husband Anthony Weiner for sending obscene material to a minor. The detail that Comey explained to Stephanopoulos—which he had alluded to previously but never, to my knowledge, explained at this length—is that the Abedin cache specifically included emails from the period of Clinton’s State tenure just before she set up the private server. That period would have been the exact time, Comey explained, when Clinton was most likely to have been warned not to set up a private server, because it would constitute mishandling classified material:

What [FBI investigators] told me was, “We have found, for reasons we can’t explain, hundreds of thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. And something much more important than that. Thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton’s Blackberry domain.”

She used a Blackberry for the first three months or so of her tenure as secretary of State before setting up the personal server in the basement. And the reason that matters so much is, if there was gonna be a smoking gun, where Hillary Clinton was told, “Don’t do this,” or, “This is improper,” it’s highly likely to be at the beginning.

(Click above to read article)
Monday's hearing promises to be quite a circus. Trump's lawyers are demanding to see everything the feds seized before prosecutors can review it, to determine if any of the material violates attorney-client privilege. Cohen will be there, presumably in a more subdued, lawyerly suit than he wore on Friday.

Oh, and did I mention that Avenatti is bringing Stormy Daniels to court today? The only one missing
will be Donald Trump himself, but you can be sure
that he'll be glued to the screen watching every move,
even if he has to put Jim Comey on the DVR.
This case goes straight to the heart of the Trump
con -- and maybe even his marriage.

In other words, the Abedin cache wasn’t just a random sampling of Clinton emails that weren’t expected to differ in any relevant way from the thousands that had already been reviewed, but were rather from the exact period most likely to contain explicit, actionable content that could have convinced the FBI to reverse its recommendation that she should not be prosecuted.

Of course, after review, the FBI did not find grounds to reverse its decision in the new cache, and there’s a case to be made that Clinton lost the election because of Comey’s much-ado-about-what-turned-out-to-be-nothing announcement that the investigation had been reopened. Your mileage may vary as to whether the additional context Comey explained to Stephanopoulos makes his decision more justified in retrospect, but I’m sure we can all agree that we should keep arguing about it until at least 2020!

What do I think about and what I do I think about it?

May, 1, 2016

I migrated everything from April to the basement file cabinet, so fitting of Spring, this blog starts anew, unfortunately, again it’s Trump on my mind. The archives for the two months I have been sharing cyberspace with billions of bloggers are below.

If you are a new reader, welcome. I do this blog alone, but always welcome critiques and ideas from you, I mean you, whoever is actually reading these words.